MacMillan

Easter Triptych

with BASIL RAMSEY

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In consideration of the extraordinary creative talent within James MacMillan,
his musical voice has been heard increasingly over the last ten years, and
one music publisher and a record company have shown unequivocally how they
feel about such music.

The
three works here (on two CDs) form a Triduum  an Easter triptych
 asone Catholic composer's passionate yet compassionate contemplation
of the events of three crucial days, the last on earth of Jesus Christ.
Linked as the pieces are, they have separate musical identity and form:
The World's Ransoming, Concerto for cello and orchestra, and Symphony
'Vigil'.

One burning question must be asked of a composer in these days of multifunctional
styles and a shortage of quivering emotion: 'what turned you on?'. James
MacMillan will tell you, I don't doubt .

Listen and absorb his intensity of musical feeling and there's much less
to ask. In the first piece of the triptych, a solo cor anglais interacts
with the orchestra in contemplating the swirling emotions of the believer
at the commencement of the tragedy on Maundy Thursday. (Click
here to listen.) A line or so of Bach's chorale Ach wie nichtig wails
in ghostly form from brass (click to listen), the
general texture rises and falls in emotive fervour, the journey of the solo
cor anglais is influenced by a variety of events increasingly disturbed
and disruptive. Gentle swirlings of crotales hush the unease periodically
before it all falls away to a knocking on wood, a significant sign to be
used again later in the triptych.

The crucial day two, Good Friday and its tumultuous happening, are beqeathed
to cello and orchestra. The drama of this is set out with the cello as both
mocker and mocked, and much of the instrument's special qualities drawn
upon extensively. The first movement, The Mockery, is therefore nightmarish,
crudely vicious, a portrait all too clearly drawn for the scene it enacts.
(Click here to listen.) Composing this concerto co-incided
with the appalling tragedy of the shooting of a class of 16 five-year-olds
in Dunblane. Not surprisingly, MacMillan's reaction spilled over into music,
to be locked into the second movement as a searing reflection on the sacrifice
of innocence, both infants and the Christ Man. (Click
to listen to the opening of the 2nd movement.) The transition in the
final movement from irony and bravado in the face of pathos, the awful nails
pounding through flesh, and the slow release as the solo cello painfully
climbs ever higher and softer (click to listen) are
an enormous tribute to MacMillan for his acute sensitivity and the radiance
of his faith.

'James Macmillan from Glasgow is the most exciting composer
to have emerged in the 1990s... (he has) a gift of communicating with electric
intensity to a wide audience, rare in new music today.' - Penguin Guide

'It is, in a word, a 'real' Cello Concerto - lyrical, combative,
rich in dialogue and scored with a skill that suggests innovative imagination.'
- The Independent

'Vigil is a breathtaking piece, potent, haunting and magnetic,
and with a profound inner beauty which speaks of music conceived by the
soul...his finest work yet.' - Geoffrey Norris, The Telegraph

The artists featured here will perform the Cello Concerto
on 2 August 1999 at the BBC Proms in London.
The complete Triduum will be performed
at the Edinburgh Festival on 22 August 1999.
The première of a new choral work Quickening will take place
at the BBC Prom on 5 September 1999.